Caution: un-niceified thoughts ahead...

Here’s what I have to look forward to the next 3 months:

I have no independent life from 11pm to about 4:30pm the next day, each weekday. Except for Thursday, when I have no life until 9:00pm. Why from 11? Work doesn’t start till 7 or 7:30. Well, if I don’t get to bed by 11 at the very latest, the deathly sleepiness that hits me the next day doesn’t really qualify as “life.” The only time that’s left unaffected is the weekends, up until late Sunday afternoon, when Monday morning approaches. Sweet those weekends are, though they’re only 2/5ths of time, and they are not entirely free of the stacked-up requirements left by the shrunken weekdays.

Do you see what my days are like?? Every hour after 9pm threatens, condemns and jeers me with the lack of sleep it will produce. Every minute of my time is overshadowed by the looming threat of death on the roads the next morning, crippled productivity at work, and sapped initiative and energy at home. And when that time is gone, there is no recourse, nothing to help, nothing to change. It is 11:15 now. It will be 11:30 at least by the time I get into bed. I am damned, I am utterly helpless. The morning will go on, and a few hours will find me torn out of desperately-needed sleep, whipping down a dark highway at 67 miles an hour, and then sitting at a desk with great obligations and greater expectations upon me.

And on top of all of this, which is co-op rotation norm, I now have “Intermediate Physical Chemistry.”

6pm – 8:30pm every Thursday. Now not only do I suffer at work, but if I’m not getting enough sleep, the intense lecture passes by in a haze. Now not only do I have only a few crumbling hours each evening, but those hours are claimed by weekly homework. And it’s not a nice sit-down-for-3-hours-and-do-it homework. The professor is good, passionate, AND he has written this textbook. So he refers us to passages to read on our own, with no explanation in lecture, and those topics are included in the large set of lengthy, deep problems. These are not look-up-and-chug problems. These are problems which are probably pretty interesting and titillating to someone who knows Thermo like I know guitar. As in, our professor. I’m a smart person, and I was completely floored by several of the problems, unable to write even one equation or assumption or condition down. THIS is the depth of learning that I must get to to do well in this class. This kind of learning comes when you sell yourself to the subject, read the textbook, think, ponder, talk to the professor, and suffer through weeks of ignorance and confusion. And I only have a few hours every day to do this in!! And those hours are already over over over full with dozens of other pressing and attractive activities like family, church, friendships, recording, writing, practicing, playing, and room/life maintenance. Oh, and I’m supposed to be throwing my life into God now for this semester, diving into the spiritual disciplines, fasting, reading, praying, digging in to the relationships here at church. On what OTHER set of 24 hours???

Right now I am enveloped in one of my LEAST favorite feelings in all of life I’ve experienced so far (A few others have come up in the last 2 months. Hell of a time.): The sick despair of seeing what you need to know and do for a class and seeing that you are significantly behind that marker. I’ve experienced it with Thermo 2, Transport, Biochem, and several other classes. Every time it comes it grinds and grates me. Every time I get an A in the class. And I know what it takes to get that A, and I feel such utter hatred for doing that in this semester that I seriously wonder if it’s time to suck up a B or a C and just ditch the whole frikking class. I’m already basically ditching this homework since I gave it 3 hours and only got a couple of the problems, and I have a whole second set to do before Thursday since the textbook was inexplicably under-ordered and late-arrived at the bookstore last week. More than the points of homework, though, is the sick feeling of not knowing and comprehending at the level I need to, and feeling the hardness of thought and amount of time that will be required to get to that level of understanding. That is what is making me despair right now. I don’t want to put that in. The thought of putting it in is ineffably dry, difficult and dreary, and when I think of the precious precious time it will suck from the coming months, I just want to smash a large pane of glass with an axe, or punch my fist bloody on a wall.

Time, I hate you. I despise and hate you like a cringing dog hates the man who beats it—I can do nothing to stop you. The only remedies for the iron grasp of time is to let go more and more of the things I love—the things that flow from who I am. I could have spent 3 more hours on this homework tonight if I would not have worked on recording a new song that thrilled me on the drive home and has potential to be a beautiful representation of what I’ve been going through this past year. If I spend all the time I have every weekday other than rudimentary meals and barebones church and family events working on this class, I will do fine in it. I could even use the spare time to clean up my room and catch up on the elusive swirling tasks that have nagged me for weeks.

But what about working out every Monday, Wednesday and Friday right after getting home from work? What about the music that flows from my soul and delights my mind and heart like nothing else does? I can not and will not shut those things out, yet I don’t see how they can fit with this class, given the inescapable constriction of a full time job an hour away.

I believe this fully expresses my temporal situation. I feel like utter crap right now. If this is what “being a man” is, then being a man sucks. I cannot picture carrying out the lifeless days that appear to be required of me ahead. Life was bleak enough when I gave up AIM and other friendships to turn to the Lord. Now those days are looking golden and carefree.

And you know what’s most irritating of all? I’m being a complete idiot about all of this. No life could be as bad as I have pictured it above. I’ve felt this way before, and life goes on and I go merrily on through it. Every pouting, self-pitying, despairing word I type condemns me as a little stupid baby, while the specter of “a man” stands over me and condemns me. I am a stupid, weak, pleasure-ruled, lazy, undisciplined and immature idiot. The more I write, the more I drive myself down that hole. The further I distance myself from where I should be, and need to be.

. . .

I bet tomorrow morning I’ll feel pretty much fine when I wake up, and go on about my day, going through the hours tired or not, coming home, hopefully working out…it’s likely that when I come back to the homework on a fresh mind I’ll realize things and get further through it that I expected. And regardless, I’ll go to class Thursday, turn it in, and sit through the lecture as the time winds by. I will continue to work on the song that I thought of today, I will spend my entire weekend in Indiana with David Altrogge, and the next week will come. And it will go. And the first exam will come. And the first exam will go. I am trying to swallow all of that right now, and it is grinding me into sick misery. I feel the weight of all that will happen pounding upon me now. I look at what I imagine I will have to do, and hate the picture that develops.

But I’ll wake up tomorrow, and go to work, and talk to Tom, and laugh, and eat lunch, and enjoy the music on my iPod…..

Times like this, though, feel like they make the rest of my life irrelevant. I see what I am, and how my life goes on and on with undone tasks, sleep-deprived hazes, and mounds and mounds of things that should be and need to be but that aren’t. I look at my normal state as stupidly-happy incompetence, letting slip nearly all of necessity for scattered flights of pleasure and interest. I look at Ken, and his life, and marvel at its perfect purposefulness and discipline, and hate my life for its childishness. “A man” would never write a journal like this.

And outside of all these thoughts here sits God, who really doesn’t give a rip about almost any of this that I’ve been blubbering about. He sees this world for what it is, and wants me to throw myself into Him, taking all my pain and regret and despair and hatred and self-pity and fear and killing it on His altar. It is the sacrifice of all this that makes a man a man, and it is that sacrifice that I don’t want to do. I don’t see how I can shut down all of that, and I don’t want to give it up. But as always, I can’t do it all now, swallow it all now, shut it all off now, and utterly change who I am as a person. Day by day I walk, and God works. He doesn’t care if my life is like Ken’s. He doesn’t care if I respect myself as my idea of “a man.” He cares about His glory, and He wants to make much of Himself, and He knows that I will love that too, when these things are peeled off of me. What saddens me so is that there is no glory there for me. No grounds for self-pity, no grounds for enjoying myself and my stuff. Just letting go of all of me and caring about God.

Hm. But God made me who I am, and I bet He’ll use that IN that enjoyment of Himself. It doesn’t sound like God to require us to completely kill and forsake our individualities and personalities and drown ourselves in Him. That sounds more like eastern mysticism. Christianity is different because God is a person, and He is good. He’s all about His glory, yes, but He has tied that in with us, and made us to be fulfilled and delighted in His glory too.

I have no (or pitiful little) experience of that happening in a practical, continuing manner in myself. Ergo this despair of the future, ergo this self-pity at the bleak lifeless future that awaits me. Ergo my despising of myself. Ergo shutting myself up and going to bed, not stuffing these feelings down, but realizing that they are not the end of the story.

--I can’t even think of a signature to use that is honest but isn’t whiny and self-pitying. So here it is, all 2 sentences of it.

HAH. Whatever I feel like, there is ONE signature I can always use:

--Son of God